A King in a Poke
Though the current version in full is"Don't buy a pig in a poke", don't buy or accept something without first checking or assessing it, it's first recorded in London around 1530 in a form intended to be good advice to honourable traders:"When ye proffer the pigge open the poke", but its best known early appearance is in John Heywood's A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the proverbes in the Englishe tongue of 1546 (a title usually and with good reason abbreviated to Proverbs), where it appears in the form"Though he love not to buy the pig in the poke". About 1555, Heywood included it in his other famous compilation work, Epigrammes, in the almost modern form"I will never bye the pig in the poke".
Many Americans know a poke as a small bag or sack, which it was also in Heywood's day (a usage that has survived in Scotland). A poke, for example, was a suitable container into which to stuff a piglet for sale in the local market.The proverb encapsulates that wise advice to purchasers of goods, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware—always inspect the goods before you pay for them. Make the seller open his poke and show you the pig within.
Incidentally, the proverb has its direct counterparts in other languages, as in the Swedish Köp inte grisen i säcken! However, in other languages it refers to cats, as in French: Acheter chat en poche ("To buy a cat in a pouch"), and German: Die Katze im Sack kaufen ("To buy a cat in a sack"). Why the expressions in these languages refer to cats and not pigs supports a link with another expression, to let the cat out of the bag.
Yesterday, Sotheby's announced that it will auction the personal library, letters, and papers of Martin Luther King on 30 June. The auction will be preceded by nine days of public viewing.
To clarify matters, this is not the collection of Martin Luther King's Papers that are on deposit at Mugar Library at Boston University. It does include both holograph documents that had been a part of the collection of King's Papers that were on deposit in the archives at the King Center in Atlanta and a collection of King's Papers, including his library, that had remained in Coretta Scott King's home for many years prior to her death earlier this year. In the late 1990s, the Library of Congress sought to purchase this collection, but for a variety of reasons Congress did not appropriate the King Estate's expected price of $20 million. Sotheby's first offered the collection for sale in August 2003 and in the intervening years there have been off-and-on discussions between the King Estate and Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. With this announcement, I assume that both parties recognize that those negotiations have gone nowhere.
Volume Six of The Papers of Martin Luther King uniquely exploits this material. The buyer would, thus, be purchasing manuscript artifacts that will be published when the sale is complete. Moreover, the King Estate has steadfastly insisted that the transfer of physical property does not include release of its claim to literary rights in the documents. The purchaser gets to warehouse the material and gets haggling rights with the King Estate and its lawyers in perpetuity. Without an institutional buyer, there is some risk that the auction will draw an entrepreneur who might then sell off individual items from it to collectors, but over the years, well-informed buyers have looked in the poke and said:"No thanks."